Word.ws English Dictionary

dunnart

/ˈdʌnə(ɹ)t/

dunnart noun: any species of the genus Sminthopsis of small carnivorous marsupials that resemble mice or shrews.

dunnart: any species of the genus Sminthopsis of small carnivorous marsupials that resemble mice or shrews
Image: Doug Beckers, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

dunnart (plural dunnarts)

  1. Any species of the genus Sminthopsis of small carnivorous marsupials that resemble mice or shrews.
    • After the winter solstice, while the ambient temperature still remained low, nest sharing declined rapidly, due to increasing intolerance among the fat-tailed dunnarts, as breeding began.2005, C. Hugh Tyndale-Biscoe, Life of Marsupials, page 158
    • During the original AWC survey, Alexander Baynes identified, in a single hollow salmon gum, 283 jaws of half-a-dozen native mammal species, mostly dunnarts, many of which were recovered from owl pellets.2009, Tim Winton, “Silent Country: Travels through a Recovering Landscape”, in Robyn Davidson, editor, The Best Australian Essays 2009, page 18

Forms of dunnart

pluraldunnarts

Origin of dunnart

Probably borrowed from Nyunga danard (“Sminthopsis griseoventer”).

Words formed from dunnart

  • Butler's dunnart
  • chestnut dunnart
  • common dunnart
  • fat-tailed dunnart
  • Gilbert's dunnart
  • greater hairy-footed dunnart
  • grey-bellied dunnart
  • Julia Creek dunnart
  • Kakadu dunnart
  • large long-tailed dunnart
  • lesser hairy-footed dunnart
  • little long-tailed dunnart
  • Ooldea dunnart
  • red-cheeked dunnart
  • sandhill dunnart
  • stripe-faced dunnart
  • white-footed dunnart
  • white-tailed dunnart

Questions about dunnart

What does dunnart mean?
Dunnart means any species of the genus Sminthopsis of small carnivorous marsupials that resemble mice or shrews.
What part of speech is dunnart?
Dunnart is a noun.
How do you pronounce dunnart?
Dunnart is pronounced /ˈdʌnə(ɹ)t/.
What is the plural of dunnart?
The plural of dunnart is dunnarts.

Words near dunnart in the dictionary

  1. Dunnam
  2. dunnamany
  3. Dunnamore
  4. Dunnams
  5. dunnarf
  6. dunnart
  7. dunnarts
  8. Dunnavant
  9. Dunnavants
  10. Dunnaway
  11. Dunnaways

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dunnart (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-dunnart.wav.

Cite this entry: “dunnart.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dunnart. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.